Our lack of a house naturally preyed on Peter’s mind, so when one morning over school dinner Mr Campbell, the art master remarked “I’ll tell you what you should do – come and live in our mill” it didn’t seem quite such a ludicrous idea. The Parkers were quite willing to keep an ear open for Gale, so we got her to bed fairly soon after tea and caught a Felixstowe bus. It seemed strange and holiday-like to be going out together on a lovely warm June evening.

We got off the bus as instructed at Banks’s Corner and started to walk past some well designed council houses with big front gardens and then along a country road. The pavement petered out; there were fields each side and wild roses in full bloom in the hawthorn hedge. It was quite a long way, past an ugly, sturdy Victorian village school which had a few houses opposite it, but no sign of a village – round a bend, and there on the right was a group of picturesque buildings.

Ignoring the tiny cottage with a steep pantiled roof, a long, large wooden barn and cart shed, also pantiled, and not daring to look further, we went in through a wooden gate in a high, untidy hedge, part overgrown hawthorn, part Duke of Argyle’s Tea Tree as Peter pointed out – and crossed a patchy lawn to Black Mill House.

Bob Campbell was tall, thin, red haired and loosely put together. He suffered from psoriasis which made his legs all scaley and, since shaving was so difficult, wore a beard. This was unusual in 1949, but in keeping for an artist! I don’t remember thinking him not too clean at that first meeting. Perhaps the war brought lower standards for us all, or perhaps the tendency to a dirty neck and food spattered clothes came later as his marriage deteriorated.
Bob, his pregnant wife Yvonne, and three children welcomed us in, but almost before we had been introduced we were out in the garden again. We crossed the grass to a circular red brick building with a strangely conical roof of black roofing felt.

“This is the mill,” Bob said. “I’ve got chickens in it now; come in and see.” He opened a low plank door and we peered into the gloom, seeming almost dark after the bright sunlight outside. There were the chickens, and plenty of chicken muck on the floor. Half in and half out of one of the home-made nest boxes on one side slept an enormous black cat. There were two tiny, dirty windows, one each side of a slit in the wall through which the hens went out to their run, and curtains of cobwebs draped and floated down to chicken head height from the low beamed and trap-doored ceiling.